House Republicans are focused on a debate over whether to fund the government through December or into next year, after hoping to pass 12 full-year funding bills. collapsed before the August break.
Since no one expects the annual funding process to be completed by the September 30 deadline, hard-liners among conservatives are calling for an interim solution, a so-called Continuing Resolution (CR), that would run until March of next year to avoid being stuck in a huge spending package under a president who has not formed a government.
They want to avoid a December funding deadline that in the past would have required House and Senate leaders to negotiate a massive omnibus spending bill.
Republican Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, a cardinal on spending policy and a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said he and other Republicans would prefer to delay a CR “into next year,” calling the prospect of a multi-year package worth more than $1 trillion a “danger.”
“If the Democrats want to negotiate in good faith in December, we can always negotiate in good faith,” he added. “But I would rather not see a December deadline.”
Conservatives are confident that former President Trump can return to the White House in November, and they hope that a transition bill for next year would give Trump more influence over how the government is funded through the fall of 2025.
Other Republicans, including members of the House Budget Committee, oppose the idea of delaying CR until next year. They are instead pushing for the current Congress to complete its funding work before the end of the year and avoid a repeat of the last funding cycle, when Congress had to pass several stopgap measures and did not complete its work until March.
“The longer we delay this and go into another calendar year, the more pressure it will put on many agencies and I think it will place an undue burden on the new president,” Republican Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (Tennessee), a cardinal on government spending, told The Hill last week.
With just over two months to go until the looming shutdown deadline in Congress, and both chambers having not yet passed their 12 annual budget bills—not to mention negotiations between the chambers—the need for an interim solution is all but certain.
When asked whether a transient solution was inevitable, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson responded jokingly on Wednesday.
“Nothing is inevitable in American politics, haven’t we all learned that by now?” Johnson said, apparently referring to President Biden’s recent withdrawal from the race for re-election and former President Trump’s survival of an assassination attempt earlier this month.
“We are talking about all the options that are on the table, but we have not made a decision yet,” Johnson said when asked about continuing the solution. “We will simply pause for a week and then get right back to it.”
The Democratic-led Senate has not yet passed a single budget bill and has only now begun to present the first draft bills from committee. earlier this month. In contrast, the House Appropriations Committee, which drafts the House’s funding bills, has already approved all of its funding bills — and the full House has approved about half of the measures.
But the House funding initiative has stalled in recent weeks as concerns about rising spending and disagreements over policies in areas such as reproductive rights that delayed funding legislation last year have resurfaced.
The Republican leadership in the House of Representatives canceled votes scheduled for next week after removing three bills scheduled for a vote this week from the floor.
This comes after 10 Republicans joined most Democrats in rejecting their bill for the Legislature’s 2025 budget earlier this month. The end result surprised Republicans because the bill, by far the smallest of the 12 funding bills, faced opposition from the right of the party in part because of its funding level.
It also predicted that the party will struggle to pass what some members say are its most arduous remaining bills. On Tuesday night, House Republican leaders pulled a scheduled vote on an energy and water spending bill.
“I have concerns about all of them right now,” Republican Rep. Steve Womack (Ark.), a cardinal on spending issues, told The Hill this week when speaking about the pending funding legislation, which also covers funding for the FBI and the departments of Education and Health and Human Services. “We’re struggling to get it passed.”
Still, some Republicans are now downplaying the need to pass the party’s remaining funding bills, especially as both sides are already trying to extend the party shutdown deadline beyond the November election, the outcome of which could give both parties an advantage in fiscal year 2025 funding talks.
When asked about Johnson’s previous promise to work on completing the budget legislation by August, Republican Representative Thomas Massie (Kentucky) said disappointedly: “It’s all just a sham anyway. It’s going to be an omnibus bill. Probably a CR bill and an omnibus bill for the lame duck.”
Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas said the question now is “whether Republicans are smart enough not to hand the keys to the kingdom to Democrats with an omnibus bill in December just because it will kill the lame duck.”
“Everything else you’re going to write about is just Beltway nonsense,” Roy also said. “The only thing that matters is what we do with a CR in March or a CR in December.”
Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, chairman of the powerful appropriations committee, has also repeatedly pushed for lawmakers to complete their work on funding the 2025 fiscal year before January.
“I was here in 2017 when we tried this, and we had the House, the Senate, of course President Trump won,” he said Last monthBut Republicans still “didn’t have much influence because there is still the possibility of the filibuster in the U.S. Senate.”
“We have [Trump] To have to sign laws that he was not allowed to negotiate … Frankly, they did not even have a [Office of Management and Budget] Director at the time when we [them] done,” he said. “I don’t think you do that to a new president, and frankly, I don’t think you do that to a new Congress.”
